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Comment by throwaw12 | Hacker News Reader

I would love to understand these people, really!

On a personal level, if thing works - I say, cool, lets focus on something else now.

But I have worked with people who are similar to the author and we will get into the conversation:

    - they: wait, but the bundle size is 2.4Mb, it can be improved a lot
    - me: by how much? and we have 10k users/day and we have cache policy setup
    - they: we can reduce it to 1Mb, imagine saving 10k*1.4Mb every day
    - me: yeah, but its not costing us much, if you focus on making it perfect your salary will cost us 2 years of outbound traffic cost.
    - they: no, but its not perfect

I admire those people, because they're valuable asset in some companies (e.g. Google scale, saving 1.4Mb for 1 Billion people every day is a lot), but my mind doesn't even want to think about what's perfect.

How do I get there? What are the resources I can read and learn from to look at things to make them perfect?

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Broken windows theory

The issue with “premature optimization is bad” is that some see it as a permission to not optimize at all. Hence you eventually end up with a system where everything is bad.

—

Although for some of us being obsessive-compulsive weirdos this is the only way of life: an itch that keeps on physically scratching until resolved.

“Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think ‘well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that?’ But, what’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right […] it’s a beautiful thing to do something right.”

> Broken windows theory

Absolutely, but on the other hand businesses operate with lots of broken windows as well, and they are fine with it.

Dilemma I am having is, on one side, business needs my best judgement for today and short term, because this is how most businesses survive, on the other hand, on a personal level I feel like I am stuck making non-perfect decisions, hence I can't even think about perfect world, because I am not training that part of my brain.

> needs my best judgement for today and short term

But this is how they also fail long-term

Russians have a saying: you can only lean (which is the same word in russian as rely on/upon, thus the physics pun angle) on something that is resisting

Meaning, it is also your job to resist enshittification for the company to succeed

Starting from a literal bandwidth costs perspective definitely won't get you there. I'd start by trying to feel personally annoyed by things like that. Then maybe try to feel more annoyed, since you know it'll touch every customer forever.

In that bandwidth case I'd be annoyed by the waste which kind of pervades software already, and it'd feel great to know at least we countered it a little bit.

> but my mind doesn't even want to think about what's perfect.

That's the barrier to understanding right there! This also makes it easy to make up 2x cost estimates to justify not improving anything

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